Anyway, usual disclaimers:- Mileage may vary, get permission from whoever pays the bill before you use the phone, mobile networks may charge differently from landlines and so on.

In a nutshell, looking at the period of this month to date, with the last 9 complete days being cpm free, impressions are up 1%, clicks up 7% ands ctr up 2% over the previous part of the month with cpm ads.

Nothing stellar there, but the other metrics are quite interesting.

EPC up 35% eCPM up 33% Earnings up 34%

These figures are site wide, as the removal is sitewide. I would say that the improvement in some of the smaller channels has been better than the higher traffic pages, but no real pattern to it. I've seen the usual daily ups and downs, but in general I prefer to look at longer term trends. I will keep monitoring of course.

I've known you can remove cpm ads for a while but never bothered. Reason being that the stats show miniscule numbers of them being shown. So the obvious question is what other changes have happened.

Well, I've done NO work on the site the last week or so. I wanted to make no changes whatsoever so as to rule out the effect of changes I've made. There haven't been any "Upgrades" during the period of the test, and I've not seen an improvement in ad targeting. So it's difficult to see what has caused this particular rise in fortunes. However, the fact that dumping site targeted ads coincides with an immediate eCPM rise of 33% can't be dismissed as a coincidence either.

AdSense account: - go to Advanced Reports - set Show data by (combobox) to Individual Ad - set mark on Show data by targeting type - contextual or site - look in the "Targeting" column. If there are "Site" entries then you are site targeted. Usual ads are of "Contextual" type.

You mentioned only a miniscule amount of CPM ads were displaying, yet it's suggested that removing them had a major impact on the bottom line of the whole site. This would require just a miniscule amount of changed impressions to have an astronomical effect in order for them to change your overall numbers that much.

I would say that not only can this be dismissed as coincidence it can be mathematically proven :)

Interesting reading. This month I have had 754881 Contextual impressions and only 73 site impressions. Do these sort of figures correlate to yours, and do you think my taking the small amount of site ones off will really make a difference? It seems such a small figure, I can't see that it would have any impact, or were your figures for site much greater?

I put the same question to hunderdown in another thread as I had suddenly started seeing site targeted ads after the maintenance on September 27th, depite having had "Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up" disabled since day one.

He recommened that I email Google to "opt-out" of site targeting, which I did on Wednesday. Yesterday I received a personal email from Molly (of The Google AdSense Team) extolling the virtues of site targeting BUT if I really wanted out... just reply to the email and the deed would be done! Which I did.

If the increases that David is reporting show up on my site as well, after site targetting stops... it'll be a very nice Christmas indeed.

I believe our ratios are relatively similar, however, since I'm not sure how CTR/eCPM REALLY get calculated, seeing 20-30 channels of page impressions with no clicks, single digit eCPM and no appreciable earnings added into my report overview... makes me think I'd like to be back out of this. Again, I had not seen any site targeted report entries until just recently.

Does opting out in your account settings not opt you out? Is it necessary to send an email as well?

You can't opt out in your account settings. All you can do is turn off the "Advertise on this site" line. But advertisers can still target your site. Google doesn't want to make it easy to opt out.

I'm a but puzzled by david_uk's results also. I think I have had all of 3 site-targeted impressions over the past month. So at least one advertiser is targeting my site, and I assume that their ads aren't displaying very often because they aren't bidding high enough. My eCPM is pretty healthy.

Would I get similar results or is it just coincidence? Over the past ten days, after a rocky first two weeks of October, my earnings and eCPM have gone up a healthy 30% or so. So if I had done the experiment when david_uk did, I might be concluding that it was stopping site targeting that had increased my earnings....

For it NOT to be coincidence, then there would have to be some mechanism in the algorithm that reduced contextual click prices overall, if there was any site-targeting, regardless of whether the site-targeted ads were showing or not. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but there could be some unintended side-effect.

Having said all that, I'm tempted to try the experiment myself. I had not stopped site-targeting on the assumption that I would likely never see many site-targeted ads but that it might drive up contextual ad prices due to more competition. Now I'm not sure. Another 30% rise in earnings would be nice!

Does opting out in your account settings not opt you out? Is it necessary to send an email as well?

As I mentioned above, I've had the "Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up" option (in My Account) disabled since the feature was first announced and never had any site targeted entries in my reports (when using the show data by targeting type option) until the system maintenance on September 23rd (I had previously mistakenly said the 27th).

I thought something had been "un-set" the disabled setting so I went and 'enabled' it and then 'disabled' it again... and I was still getting the site targeting entries.

It was hunderdown who suggested contacting Google as it would seem that there is now a difference in not being part of "Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up" and not recieving CPM ads... which I had previously thought were the same thing.

My feeling has always been that the 1 cent payouts are taking up valuable real estate on my site - where I could earn 30-70 cents, I just gave that up for 1 cent.

This may seem like a naive question, but if you've got pages that are earning one cent per click, and if you can get 30 to 70 cents with something else, why not put the 30- to 70-cent alternative on those pages? You don't have to use AdSense throughout your site.

It was hunderdown who suggested contacting Google as it would seem that there is now a difference in not being part of "Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up" and not recieving CPM ads... which I had previously thought were the same thing.

There always was a difference, unfortunately. As I have said in other posts, Google does not want to make opting out of site-targeting easy. The "Onsite Signup" was in fact meant to make it easier for advertisers to find you, but site-targeting existed as an option BEFORE then, and you can be site-targeted even if you turn it off.

One last time, so everyone is clear: You must email Google to tell them that you do not want site-targeted ads.

site-targeted ads can be either image or text, AFAIK. If you only want image ads on your site--which in most cases is going to severely limit the eligible inventory and thus your earnings, by the way--you control them in the way you did. Site-targeting is a separate issue.

if you can get 30 to 70 cents with something else, why not put the 30- to 70-cent alternative on those pages

EFV- there is NO consistant pattern!

It's a different mix of channels everyday. There would never be anyway of determining which should be converted to an alternative other than converting them all. Then I would have "alternatives throughout my site".

One of the channels showing CPM ads yesterday has earned a couple of $2.00 clicks with context ads today. That's what is so annoying... if the CPM ads hadn't been there yesterday... maybe I would have had a better day (although it was quite good).

I agree--it's the eCPM that's the critical factor. From previous discussions, it seems that although AdSense is supposed to serve site-targeted ads only when they will out-earn the contextual ads on an eCPM basis, in practice site-targeted ads often drag down earnings on high eCPM sites.

Size of site isn't important. Subject area may be, as it affects bid price and inventory.

Thanks, hunder, and, no, I don't want just image ads, I want both and I get them. Since I run some other CPM ads (which pay for lots of things every month, thank you), image ads from Google provides a little more graphical mix at times.

Call me crazy, but I always thought news and stories are just there to take up space between ads ;-)

From previous discussions, it seems that although AdSense is supposed to serve site-targeted ads only when they will out-earn the contextual ads on an eCPM basis, in practice site-targeted ads often drag down earnings on high eCPM sites.

I don't believe your description is accurate. All Google has said is that it will provide the best paying. I don't recall that anywhere there is reference to best ecpm.

You might be right, but it probably falls into the "we don't know" category, so it's risky to assume it.

I think the most important issue is that I don't want advertisers to be able to consistently appear on my site for a CPM of $1-2. I can easily get $10-20 CPM with a private arrangement, so why would I want to allow advertisers to get onto my site permanently for 1/10 the true market rate. In extremely specialized niches such as mine, adwords prices are a bargain and do not represent the true market price in terms of ROI.

Same here. And those CPM ads are pretty easy to recognize , since (a) the ad unit consists of one ad with a larger-than-normal headline, and (b) the ad may be appropriate for the site but doesn't necessarily match any of the keywords on the page.

My point is that even if I took the time to find the CPM channel, a low value CPM channel one day can (will likely) become a high quality contextual channel the next. Why would I want to convert that channel (ad) to some alternative? If a channel showed up as CPM consistantly... I'd certainly agree!

Yes, Chapman, I understand your point. I wonder why the EPC/eCPMs on some of your pages are so volatile--could it be that there are only a few high-paying advertisers bidding on those pages' keywords, and when they take a break from bidding, the average EPC goes down?

A thought strikes me. I'm not too sure that we know how cpm ads are reported.

As an advertiser I can set up a cpm campaign much as I can a cpc campaign. I can target keywords in exactly the same way. How are these campaigns reported?

They aren't site target in the manner that an advertiser has signed up to appear on my site. I've disabled those before they started and shouldn't have any. But, is that what I'm seeing in my stats? The odd stray?

How do Google account for cpm ads that are targeted by keyword? As they are contextual campaigns, are they lumped in with contextual CPC ads for reporting? If so, that may well explain the one factor that bothered me about this.

So do we know how cpm campaigns by keyword are reported is now the question. If they are reported as contextual along with cpc campaigns, then we simply don't know what percentage of contextual cpc campaigns we are seeing. So if that was the case, disabling cpc ads (which is what I asked them to do) will only show in the changes seen once they are dumped. Maybe that explains the worrysome point. Maybe Google should, account for cpm and cpc contextual campaigns differently.